I’ve been thinking… “Thoughts constitute the greatness of man,” wrote Pascal in “The Pensées.” He explains it this way: “I wish to show you an infinite and indivisible thing. It is a point moving everywhere with an infinite velocity; for it is one in all places, and is all totality in every place. Our minds can consider such possibilities, even apparently impossible ones because we can think.”
Genesis 1 tells us: “In the beginning… God said let there be light.” This means that divine thought and consciousness came before even the event of light. The Gospel of John starts in the same way: “In the beginning was the Logos (word).” The Logos is consciousness and information pure and simple. John is very clear about the importance of God’s consciousness/awareness. The Logos is not only prior to everything that is made, but is also personal, “All things come into being through him.” Teilhard de Chardin calls this the “tenacious personalism” of divine awareness at the omega point of everything. This alive and personal word is the first definition of God in John 1. “The Word was with God, and the Word was God… the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… full of grace and truth.” Matthew and Luke join with John and tell with ordinary event narrative how this happened on an actual day in human history; the eternal speech of God was born into a family at Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King.
Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount makes the consciousness of God a major theme. He invites his followers to pray to God in the privacy of their room. Jesus the teacher makes it clear that we need to know two things: God can see us and God can hear us (Matthew 6:5-8). In that quiet room of prayer two kinds of consciousness are put together, God’s awareness and our awareness. One of the reasons I believe in God is this reality of consciousness.
There is an argument from analogy here. We are able to think, to remember and to imagine because God exists. God gives to us our eyes so that we see, ears so that we hear, mouths so that we can speak, and our minds so that we may wonder. The one who created these possibilities is also able to see and hear; God is also able to speak. This happened when the Word became flesh. Pascal writes: “It is incomprehensible that God should exist and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist… all these contradictions; which seem most to keep me from the knowledge of the Christian belief have led me most quickly to the true one.”
It is the true one who finds us. This finding happens because God’s awareness is not passive but is compassionate. God’s consciousness is not stranded as idea or imaginative awareness but is concrete and totally personal in the mixture of who Jesus Christ is and what he does. Jesus is the Redeemer who finds us.
I like the whimsical way that Pascal tells it: “An artisan may speak of wealth, a lawyer may speak of war, or of royalty, etc. But it is a rich man who may rightly speak of wealth, a king may speak indifferently of a great gift he has just made, and God rightly speaks of God.”
Consciousness may be the newest frontier in the dialogue between science and faith, even where quantum physics and Logos may occupy the same sentence. Consciousness means that we listen, look, and speak; because of our awareness we should not be surprised that Ultimate Consciousness is able to listen, hear and speak too.
EARL PALMER is senior pastor emeritus at University Presbyterian Church in Seattle.